May 31, 2002:

Back when I had a regular column in GalaxyOnline
(which was the most spectacularly fun writing gig I've ever scored) I
did a couple of columns on my great fear: cruise missiles. I hazarded
that they would become increasingly easy to build over time, and that
even a model airplane hobbyist could create something that could do considable
damage. Looks like I was right: New Zealander Bruce Simpson posted an
article describing how low-cost cruise missiles might be made. Read
it and you'll understand why I'm now more worried than ever.

Simpson speaks of building his own pulse-jet engines, but even that isn't
necessary. Way back in 2000, I pointed out a site where you can buy miniature
turbojet engines from SimJet in Denmark.
These are smallish versions of the truck-sized engines that drive modern
jetliners, and are very popular among high-end RC model airplane enthusiasts.
Sure, the engines are a couple thousand bucks each, but for the most part
terorrists don't lack for that kind of lunch money. Even building the
aircraft itself isn't necessary, if you have the money and develop the
contacts within the model aircraft community. The difference between a
good-sized RC model fighter jet and a cruise missile isn't much more than
a GPS receiver and the sort of minimal smarts that Simpson describes on
his site.

Making such an aircraft nuclear is a much tougher challenge, but the
scary part is that you can do a lot of damage and cause of lot of anguish
and disruptionand even deathwithout anything nuclear at all.
Given the drought conditions around the West these days, having an expendable
GPS-controlled minijet cruise over some of the national forests dropping
little incediary bombs could create a conflagration unlike anything ever
seen. And let's not even talk about a quart-sized canister of anthrax
spores...

It's too late to turn off GPS; too many things depend on it now, and even
dithering it like it was until 1998 wouldn't deter homebrew cruise missiles,
which don't need meter-precision guidance to cause havoc. And the Europeans
are debating whether to deploy a global positioning system of their own,
called Galileowhich
will, if deployed, have even greater accuracy than GPS. The sorts of missile-shield
systems the military is talking about guard against ICBMs. It's far from
clear to me what one could use to guard against miniature cruise missiles
of this sortprobably nothing. Sooner or later, we're going to have
to face up to the Big Ugly: whether we begin profiling people for surveillance
based on their Arabic origins or their Islamic beliefs. After the next big
blowup, whatever it turns out to be (and while we can pray it won't happen,
my suspicion is that it will) ducking that issue won't work anymore.

May 30, 2002:

One final question that I don't want to hear
again, although this one is way more personal: Why don't you
have children? I've been asked this a number of times in the past
ten or twenty years, generally by friends who are close enough to me to
figure I won't punch their lights out for their impertinence. The answer
is simple, though I suspect most people won't accept it: Carol and I never
felt called to be parents. It's not that we don't value childrenhardly,
we value them tremendously, and we do not see in ourselves some of the
essential facets of temperament required to bring up children correctly.
Childrearing is something we do not want to get wrong, and the older we
get, the more we perceive that we were not cut out for that sort of adventure.
To find a young son in my arms, bruised and weeping after an encounter
with some claybrained bully, would break my heartand fill me with
a murderous rage. My father reacted to that situation many years ago by
trying to teach me to fight, and was puzzled and disappointed that I could
not bring myself to deliberately hurt another human being, even in self-defense.
I lack his unflappable composure (though I did inherit his unshakable
optimism) and most of his Germanic fearlessness and Irish charm. Could
I do what he did? I don't think so.

He knew he wanted children, knew in his guts. Just as surely, I knew
in my guts that I would fall short in the attempt to raise a child as well
as he raised me. My strengths lie elsewhere, and it's remarkable that in
Carol I found a spouse who felt almost precisely the same way. (Much conflict
in marriages emerges from differences in feelings about having and rearing
children.) I am pleased to see that among my own friends who chose to have
children, their children are rapidly becoming intelligent, compassionate,
sane adults. Clearly, that task is being well-handled by others. Carol and
I have our own tasks to accomplish, things which may not have all the drama
of childrearing, but are important in the cosmic scheme nonetheless. (Someone
told me once that "you taught an entire generation to master Turbo
Pascal," and if true, it's something I'm damned proud of.) Not everyone
is called to be a parent, and with luck and a little Divine mercy, I won't
have to answer that particular question again.

May 29, 2002:

While we're talking about idiotic questions
that people ask (see my May 27, 2002 entry) here's another one I see in
magazines and on the Web far too often: "Why do they hate us?"
("They" being Islam.) Well, duh: They're being taught
to hate us, people! The Middle East is shot through with these little
schools in which Islamic extremist teachers indoctrinate young boys in
how Allah delights in the murder of westerners, and will reward suicide
bombers and airplane hijackers with a private harem of virgins (virgins?
Why not women who know what they doing?) and all the food they can eat,
which for my money is a pretty thin vision of Paradise. Yes, I know, it's
not all muslims; Islam is no more uniform than Christianity, and
the fringes of all religious bell curves are pretty ugly. I also know
the difference between the Shi'ite and Sunni factions within Islam and
how they came about, and if you don't it would be worth reading up on,
though I can't cite a book off the top of my head. (One I think is
The Lucifer Effect, but I can't lay hands on it this morning. I'll
try and find it and report back.)

In broader terms, I think it's fair to say that hatred is not a natural
condition of humanity. Envy and pride and other things may be, but for the
most part I think we're hard-wired by evolution to at least hold our noses
and get along. Genuine hatred, be it KKK-style or Islamic nutcase style
or any other style, is passed on from parents and other adults to children.
As the Children of the Sixties preached ad nauseam (and yup, I was in that
gang, participating in the ad nauseam): break that cycle, and the world
will be a better place.

May 28, 2002:

More on clowning. (See my entry for May 25,
2002.) Jim Mischel had no clue where clowns and clowning originated, but
he threw more fuel on the fire by citing one of the all-time worst SF
movies: Killer
Klowns from Outer Space. I didn't see that one, but I was in Santa
Cruz when it came out in 1987, and the local druggies absolutely adored
it. Whoever did the movie knew very well why clowns scare kids, because
all those elements are exaggerated in the film. These are really
scary clowns. (Why they spell it with a "k" puzzles me, unless
the Clowns Union threatened to sue for defamation or something.)

Then there's The No-Clown Zone.
Clearly, we're on the trail of a genuine cultural phenomenon here, and
where it might lead is anybody's guess. Somewhere in the NCZ site the
author expresses the opinion (which I've heard before) that clowns are
the lineal descendents of the devil figures in medieval morality plays,
and that certainly feels right, given the medieval abhorrence for chaos
and uncontrolled behavior.

My sister Gretchen Roper suggested that our modern circus clowns were
strongly influenced by the stock character Pantaloon in the Italian improvisational
dramatic form Commedia
Dell'Arte, who generally wore hugely baggy pants in an era (the 16th-18th
centuries) when most men wore tights or cassocks of some kind. Pantaloon
was a ridiculous character, and the other characters taunted and made
fun of him...so maybe our modern clowns can be seen as archetypal figures
taking Pantaloon's revenge.

On the other hand, most of us now wear pantaloons...er, pantsso perhaps
Pantaloon has already had his revenge, in that we're now all wearing clown
suits and don't even realize it.

May 27, 2002:

Why did the Sixties happen? (That is, why was
that the period in First World history when all the young people went
a little nuts?) My theory: The Boomer generation was the first generation
not raised brutally in a brutal world. When the leading edge of
that generation hit maturity, there rose up a desire to put an end to
the myriad species of nastiness that had been absolved under the hateful
(and often preconscious) conviction that "I had to suffer when I
was young, so these young folks had better get used to it."

We forget sometimes how completely hideous most human life was prior
to the post WWII period. My grandfather had a whip hanging on the wall
during the Depression, and he beat his sons with it because he thought
it would be good for themand because he himself had been beaten
as a teen in Poland. Because almost everybody had suffered from one cause
or another (some unavoidable, some hateful) suffering was seen as the
natural state of things, and structural nastiness like racial and ethnic
discrimination was just one more inevitable downside of living. Once education
and general higher standards of living had pushed many sorts of suffering
down into the noise, those who had suffered the least (the maturing Boomer
generation) set out with ideals blazing to eliminate all the structural
suffering they could identify. Without maturity's sense of perspective,
idealism can go wrong, and we had riots and drug parties and the sexual
carnival to cope with.

On the other hand, the Sixties got people's attention, and for all the side
effects we're still dealing with, the unquestioned cycle of brutality and
injustice begetting brutality and injustice will never be what it was before
1950. I am a little surprised at how many times I've seen this silly question
in printusually by people who came of age before or after the Boomers.
Those who came before couldn't see it, and those who came after took it
for granted, but something very special happened in the 1960s: Suffering
was no longer seen as the completely unavoidable consequence of being born.

May 26, 2002:

It
seems a little (or more than a little) narcissistic to call attention to
it, but what the hell: Delphi Informant's formidable Alan C. Moore
interviewed me a couple of months ago, and the
interview has now been published. Alan was great to work with, and didn't
ask any stupid questions, which is a problem with interviews sometimes.
("Mr. Duntemann, how can you possibly believe in an afterlife
without a shred of evidence reproducible in the laboratory by skeptical
scientists?") My only quibble with the interview is that Alan (or somebody
at Informant) changed my use of "SF" (for "science fiction")
to "SciFi." I've never understood this (it happens a lot) unless
it's to keep west coasties from thinking I'm talking about San Francisco.

May 25, 2002:

I don't scan Plastic
as much as I used to. For the most part, it's become a gathering point
for trolls, and I can only deal with so much of that. The bulk of the
stories are now political in nature, when before there was a satisfying
scattering of offbeat pointers to items in science, technology, and culture.

I spotted one
today that was, however, intriguing: There is a technical name for
fear of clowns. The term is coulrophobia. Now, there's a technical
term for almost everything in psychology; I wouldn't doubt that there's
a technical term for fear of variable stars. (See yesterday's entry.)
This one taps into something significant: A lot of people are either afraid
of clowns, or find the idea of clowns deeply disturbing. Steven King tapped
into this fear in his pompously idiotic novel It, which I could
not finish, but got far enough into to appreciate his nailing coulrophobia
right to the wall with the loathsome and utterly evil clown-creature Pennywise.

King
didn't invent the fear of clowns by any means. There is a whole category
of weirdness involving satanic phantom clown sightings, summarized neatly
in Loren Coleman's gonzo book, Mysterious
America, a collection of captious reports of mysterious creatures
great and small; good fun if you like that sort of thing. I don't give
the events described a great deal of credence, but I will point out that
kids don't much like clowns and don't generally think they're funny. Mostly,
small children are terrified by grownups in funny outfits who romp around
maniacally like they're completely out of control.

It's deep, nay, mythic fear, and I'll hazard a guess that beneath
the psychiatric gobbledegook is the ancient fear of chaos. Clowns represent
chaos, unpredictability, and disorder, and while grownups laugh at them,
it's an odd, nervous sort of laughter, kind of like whistling past the graveyard.
Life in general and human life in particular comprise a sort of attack on
chaos via short-term reversal of entropy, so the idea of chaos cannot help
but have mythic resonances within us, even if we can't explain them. Coleman
states that circus clowns as we know them grew out of the devil figures
in medieval morality plays, and although I've not heard that elsewhere,
it's just possible enough to be true. So where did the modern idea of clowns
come from? Anybody got any pointers? I went looking and didn't turn much
up.

May 24, 2002:

"Antares" means "rival of Mars."
Okwhat, then is the term for "rival of Antares?" Right
now, Delta Scorpii. Something odd is happening in the constellation Scorpius.
The star at the middle of the Scorpion's head (the farthest north of the
constellations brighter stars) has doubled in brightness in the
last two years, to a current high of +1.6. It now rivals Antares, which
at mag +1.2 is the twelfth brightest star in the heavens. (Smaller is
brighter in this system.) I saw it a few weeks ago, and I scratched my
head: The constellation just looked wrong. What was that? Was Mars in
Scorpius? No, that's Delta.

That's the fun part about astronomy. You never know what's going to happen.
Is Delta about to blow up? Probably not. Is the new brightness permanent?
We have no way to know except to watch. Scorpius is still mostly a morning
constellation, but as the summer opens it will appear earlier and earlier
in the night. If you've never watched the skies, it'll look like just another
star...but if, like me, you've been watching with skies in wonder for forty
years, you're likely to gasp. G'wan out tonight and look!

May 23, 2002:

Heading
for home. Will spend tonight in Albuquerque, and then blast back to Scottsdale
on Friday. We're out of clean clothes and we miss our waterbed, but egadthis
place is marvelous! The scenery is beautiful, the size of the town manageable,
the people were most friendly. I suspect we'll be back in the worst of the
summer, but real life calls, sigh.

May 21, 2002:

One remembers odd things about places one visits,
and the odd thing I'll always remember about Colorado Springs are the
moths and the kamikaze birds. In every hotel room we've had here, there
are, well, these moths. Moths have flown into my hair just walking
down the street. They were in a beautiful custom home we looked through.
They were flying around inside significant restaurants. I don't know what
kind of moths they are; they're very generically moth-y, brown and about
the size of the moths that you have to dump out of your bathroom light
fixture every couple of years to keep it from casting weird shadows on
the wall. Whatever kind of moths they are, they are about as far from
an endangered species as it's possible to be.

But what really made these otherwise undistinguished moths unforgettable
were the birds that pursue them. Every time we stopped at a red light, there
were these small birds doing some of the most amazing aerobatics right in
the middle of the intersection, dodging moving cars (some moving very
quickly) in pursuit of the previously described moths. They move so fast
we can't quite tell what kind of birds they are. Carol thinks they're swifts,
and if they are, well, it fits. They're also highly maneauverable; one chased
a moth to within a few inches of my 4Runner's windshield, and for a second
and change I thought the car would be wearing it. Oddly, we see the most
birds at intersections, even after searching for them up and down Academy
Avenue, one of Colorado Springs' main drags. The birds are clearly feasting
on the moths, and the moths seem to like traffic intersections. There are
ecological dynamics here that I doubt have ever been fully explainedor
even noticed by anybody who matters. We're looking forward to coming back
in a few months to see if the moths are still hereor if those birds
have gorged themselves until they're too fat to fly.

May 19, 2002:

Back in Colorado Springs for a few days, before
we bid farewell to cool temps and head back to the Scottsdale griddle.
(It was 104 there the other day.) On the backswing we got a room at a
brand new Holiday Inn near the Colorado Springs airport. It's remarkable
in two ways as hotel rooms go: It has bright light bulbs in the desk lampsand
even a floor lamp to read by!and a broadband connection right at
the desk, at no extra charge! This is amazing, and it seems to be a trend.
The nice people at the front desk found us a room at an Albuquerque Holiday
Inn with a broadband port in the room for when we head back home in a
few days.

The link is a Category 5 jack in the wall over the desk, and all you need
to connect is a laptop and a Cat5 patch cable. I had to go down to OfficeMax
to get one, but it becomes a standard part of my travel kit now. There was
no software to install. I plugged in the cable, booted the ThinkPad, and
Win2K found the network all by itself. You have to be set for DHCP and WINS
resolution must be enabled, but that's my ordinary setup at home. This link
isn't as fast as the link at the Cheyenne Mountain Resort (see my entry
for May 12, 2002) but it's more than fast enough for email and casual Web
surfing. DSLReports gave me 250 Kbps down, 39 Kbps up just now, which is
a little slower than when I tested it late at night. I would guess it's
a shared link (heh!) but it didn't cost anything extra and it just worked.

May 15, 2002:

Reader
Glen Gieske solved the mystery of the electric railroad out in the middle
of dust-blown Indian country in northeastern Arizona. (See my entry for
May 9, 2002.) The railroad we saw was the Black Mesa and Lake Powell Railroad,
a 78-mile short line that has no connection to any other railroad from the
outside world. It was created solely and specifically to haul coal from
the Black Mesa coal mine to the Navaho Nation's electric generating station
at Page. The power plant powers the railroad, obviating the need to truck
in megaquantities of diesel fuel to a very isolated part of the country.
For a nice writeup of the railroad, with pictures, see this
site. Electric locomotives are not common in the US anymore, and the
BM & LP bought its locos from Mexico. They were the first in the country
to use 50,000 volt power, which makes for highly efficient use of electricity
(less I2R loss, as you EEs know well) but sheesh, don't fly your kite next
to that catenary!

May 14, 2002:

Carol
and I worked our way north from Colorado Springs today heading for Denver,
and took a short detour through Black Forest, Colorado, which is a small
town set in the midst of a huge stand of ponderosa pine trees. It's becoming
a very fashionable and expensive place to live, and we stood in awe of
some of the log mansions they are throwing up over there.

There is something a little bit odd about mature ponderosa pines that
is worth mentioning: The orange bark, where exposed (often where animals
rub or chew it) smells not of pine but of butterscotch. You may
not be anywhere near a ponderosa pine in the near future, but if you ever
find yourself beside a big thick one with orange bark, put your nose up
to it and inhale. It's the guldurndest thing.

I'll be busy at the Catholic Convergence 2002 conference in Denver for a
couple of days, and won't bore you all with the details. (You've probably
heard me blather quite enough about the Old Catholic movement here.) We're
going back to Colorado Springs on Saturday, and will spend a couple more
days there before heading home.

May 13, 2002:

After
getting a good night sleep (and catching up on an enormous pile
of email, thanks to the resort's marvelous wireless Internet access system;
see yesterday's entry) we got down to some serious touristing and went
up Pike's Peak on the famous Manitou and Pike's Peak Cog Railway. Shown
at left is the two-car train parked at the Peak.

The Cog Railway is over 100 years old, which is remarkable enough: The
thought of putting a railroad right up the side of one of the continent's
most significant mountains is intimidating enough even today. In the 1890's
they used these very odd "sloper" steam locos (photo below;
this one still works and runs up the mountain every so often!) which were
built at the average angle the railway used up the mountain (somewhat
surprisingly, only about 20%) to keep the water in the boiler more or
less level as the loco sat on the track.

A "cog railway" if you're not familiar with the term, is a
mechanism used to overcome slipping on the rails for track that runs at
very steep grades. There is literally a toothed linear gear (a rack) running down the middle of the entire length of track, and
beneath the locomotives (the modern cars are self-driven) is a matching
rotary gear (the cog) that meshes with the linear gear. Turn the
cog via steam power (or today, electricity generated by a diesel engine)
and the loco moves up the hill, reliably and without slipping. It's very
smooth, and the ride was comfortable if not especially fast, and the scenery
breathtaking. The summit was 40° colder than the balmy 70° at
the mountain's base in Manitou Springs, and we were knee-deep in snow,
whipped by intermittent but very strong winds.

Carol took
the opportunity to make her first snowball in a good long while, and probably
the highest one (at 14,100 feet above sea level) that she will ever make.
Although it looks from the photo at left that there is a lot of snow lying
around, there should actually have been several feet of snow at the
summit this time of year, and the scant snowcover there is indicative of
the serious drought being suffered by most states in the West, even as the
lower midwest is fit to drown in torrential spring rains. Much of Colorado
Springs' muinicipal water supply comes from snowmelt off the Front Range,
so people here are understandably worried about the coming summer. We got
a little rain in the evening, and more is forecast, but the outlook remains
dry. We're off to Denver tomorrow for Catholic Convergence 2002, an Old
Catholic conference hosted by the American
Old Catholic Church. I don't know precisely where I'll connect to while
we're in Denver, so my postings may be sparse for a few more days, but hang
in there. I'll be back.

May 12, 2002:

Went over the Continental Divide at Wolf Creek
Pass and made our way east of the Front Range and north to Colorado Springs.
The mountains were awesome, though their lack of snowcover at the highest
altitudes (over 14,000 feet) was troubling. When we stopped for lunch
at Durango yesterday, a young man told us that there has been only 20%
of typical snowfall in the Colorado Rockies this past winter, which has
taken river and reservoir levels way down. On the other hand, by
the time we got to Pueblo, it was raining lightly but steadily, and although
I hate driving in rain (and we came here to see Pike's Peak, sigh) I can't
begrudge the locals the water they desperately need.

Here in Colorado Springs we're staying at a terrific place: Cheyenne
Mountain Resort, just southeast of the city at the foot of legendary
Cheyenne Mountain, where NORAD has its famous hidey hole. Apart from being
beautiful and relatively cheap on the weekends (we got a gorgeous room for
$89/night) they rent Lucent Orinoco wireless PC cards to guests for $10/day.
Through the cards you get wireless access to their broadband connection
to the Net. DSLReports calls it
1425 Mbps downlink and 1433 uplink, so it's T-1 class and symmetrical. I'm
sitting in my room nuking spam and writing this entry on my laptop. No wires,
and $10/day for T-1 broadband? Cheap! I had thought of looking for an Internet
cafe, but this turned out to be a whole lot better. Highly recommended.

May 11, 2002:

They
have a Galloping Goose here! Parked in front of the Dolores Public Library
is Goose #5, of the seven originally made during the Depression to act
as interurban public transportation for the little towns along the Rio
Grande & Southern RR. A Galloping Goose is one of the guldurndest
railroad lashups in history. An enterprising company transplanted a gutsy
Pierce Arrow engine into the front of a passenger bus, hung an extension
on the end for additional cargo space (primarily for the US Mail) and
then put the whole shebang on narrow gauge railroad wheels. They ran from
about 1930 to 1950, with suspension so bad you better have had your teeth
glued in well or you'd lose 'em.

Another point worth making about Dolores is that, as far as we've seen (and
this town is so small I suspect we've seen all of it, some of it more than
once) is that there is not a single national franchise business here.
Not one. No Applebee's, no Denny's, no Home Depot, no Burger King, no Marshall's,
no Target, no WalMart. Everything is local, and I am surprised at how odd
and legendary that makes the place seem.

May 10, 2002:

In Dolores, Colorado; a little town ten miles
NNW of Cortez, which is a slightly (only slightly) larger town about 25
miles NW of Four Corners and due west of Durango. It's been around for
quite awhile; some of the historic buildings we walked past were built
in the late 1880s. In a fashion quite similar to Roseville, California
(see my entry for April 9, 2001) Dolores consists of many old and slightly
funky 1920s houses, some in better shape than others but all of them occupied
and many of them strikingly elegant.
A lot of the people who live here work all the way in Telluride, a ski
slum waythehell up in the mountains, where the rich people have inflated
housing prices to the point that the waiters and convenience store clerks
haven't the least chance to actually live there. There's a cool sort of
Sixties hippie funkiness about the whole town, and Carol and I spent some
time walking up and down the gravel residential streets, leaning over
the rickety picket fences to scratch the dogs and listening to the (much
abated) breeze stirring the wind chimes people had hung beside their front
doors.

Our hotel is right across the street from a little Catholic Church built
in 1901. Cute as bug with a bell tower containing a real live church bell,
(when was the last time you heard a church bell, folks?) to my eyes it looks
like a Catholic church ought to look, not like the damfool sacred warehouses
we see more and more these days. The Roman Catholic priest shortage has
struck hard here; the parish shares a priest with three other small towns,
and Dolores is the smallest among them, so mass is on Saturday night, and
the church is locked and empty on Sunday morning. It used to be a mortal
sin not to go to mass on Sunday; now, John Paul II's intrasigence makes
it impossible for Catholics here to go to mass on Sunday at all. There's
a Baptist church right across the street with services on Sunday morning,
and I wouldn't blame them if local Catholics defected. Wouldn't it be easier
just to let women and married men be priests too? Or must we destroy the
Church in order to preserve these (highly dubious) traditions?

May 9, 2002:

Weather.com said "high winds" throughout
this area, but what they should have said was "dust." For we've
been driving through dust all day, dust and more dust, dust flowing across
the road in shades of red and tan and drifting against the curbs like
snow that doesn't melt. The wind out there must be forty MPH, and even
my relatively massive 4Runner is getting tossed around the roads. Had
lunch at a McDonald's in Tuba City, Arizona in the midst of a screaming
dust storm, and clearly the locals do this a lot, because they just kept
on keeping on as though it were as clear as sky blue water. One guy stood
outside eating a Big Mac in the blinding dusthe's definitely getting
his minerals today, if not necessarily his vitamins. May make it to Cortez
if not Dolores. We'll see.

One peculiar thing we did see today was a run of railroad tracks that paralleled
US 160 for about fifteen miles near Cow Springs, Arizona (boy, what could
Gary Larson do with that?) that had catenary run above it. That means
it was built for electric locomotives. The track was fairly new, and extremely
well maintained over concrete sleepers. It looked, in fact, like the track
they use in France for the TGV bullet trains. But Cow Springs is farther
from the bright center of the galaxy than even Tatooinewhat the hell
was that track built for? We hoped against hope for a train while we paralleled
it, but no luck. Does anybody have any clue?

May 8, 2002:

We're
off tomorrow on a freeform road trip adventure, up through Northern Arizona
to Four Corners, then east through southern Colorado, to spend a little
time poking around Colorado Springs, and finally to attend the Catholic
Convergence conference in Denver next Wednesday. I'm not sure entirely where
we're going to stop nor what we'll look at. I'm interested in visiting the
little town of Dolores, and later on, Pogosa Springshave never dunked
my butt in a natural hot springs, and this might well be my chance. I'll
record my thoughts as I go, but unless I can find an Internet cafe somewhere
that'll rent me a connection for an hour, it's unclear how quickly any of
this stuff is going to be posted. Stand by.

May 6, 2002:

While cleaning
out my wallet this morning, I found a lot of very peculiar stuff packed
into its farther corners. Typical is this "take a number" ticket
from the Barnelli's hot dog place on Dempster in Niles, Illinois, where
Carol and I eat a lot when we're there. I ordered my usual, handed the
girl a ten, and she handed me change along with a ticket that said, "Boo!"
Their prices aren't all that scary, so I must have just gotten lucky and
pulled the first ticket on the "B" roll. Too bad it wasn't Halloween.

I also looked in the "secret compartment" for the first time in
a very long time, and found several wheat pennies that had been there so
long the sulfur in the leather had turned them green. Keeping the pennies
company was an old twentyfunny how odd they look now, doubly funny
for how recently the new ones shoved them aside. So...what's the weirdest
thing in your wallet?

May 5, 2002:

The biological weapons that most people are
currently talking about are not the ones that worry me. I'm not being
facetious in saying that weapons that kill have a drawback: Death attracts
attention. People notice quickly when other people keel over. Causes
and effects happen quickly enough to be apparent, and retaliation is at
least possible. Even if you had a long-latency killer like AIDS, the effects
would be horrific enough to cause the injured nation of group to do the
sleuthing it takes to find the attacker and strike back. And as the history
of natural plagues have shown us, the natural human birthrate replaces
dead people relatively quickly.

Now, what if a bioweapon didn't kill, or even cause significant illness?
Supposed all it did was sterilize?

I remember this whole nightmare bubbling up in the back of my head years
ago, when I contemplated that all of humanity must pass through a pair
of two-millimeter tubes inside a woman's body. Block those tubesand
humanity is history.

A sterilizer weapon that quietly blocked the Fallopian tubessay,
by causing scarring along the interior of the tubeswould be different
from a death weapon in a number of ways:

Sterility doesn't attract anything like the attention death or disease
do. Just noticing that a sterility plague is abroad would take awhileprobably
not less than nine months, until birth rate figures actually become
affected.

Reducing birth rates has an exponential effect on future populations.
It's the un-gift that keeps on un-giving. If the weapon cannot be eradicated
in a relatively few years, it could cause a radical reduction in human
populations.

Reversing sterility is a difficult and expensive business, as those
women who have had second thoughts about tubal ligations have learned.
Even if you cure people of the microorganism, the damage is done and
would be hard to undo.

The cultural nature of sexual interaction makes it possible to do
some crude demographic targeting by making the weapon an STD.

The bitchy part is, nature offers bioterrorists an organism that's already
halfway there: Chlamydia.
It has fairly mild symptoms that sometimes mimic other conditions, like
abdominal flu or food poisoning. Women, in particular, can contract the
disease and not even know they have it. It is known to cause scarring
in the fallopian tubes and the epididymis, the tubes in men that carry
sperm from the testes.

Turning Clamydia into a weapon would, paradoxically, require making it
a kinder, gentler disease, one that confined its affects almost entirely
to the fallopian tubes. It's already highly contagious right out of the
box. Not much else would need to be done to it. If it got around broadly
(supposedly we see four million new cases a year) and never called much
attention to itself, its damage would be done long before victims sought
treatment. It wouldn't even need to be antibiotic resistant, though that
would give it some extra time to work and isn't difficult to accomplish
in the laboratory. Its
genome is already being sequenced at UC Berkeley.

Once discovered, we'd have less than forty years to develop a lasting
vaccine and vaccinate all humanity. Chlamydia vaccines have been attempted,
but the peculiarities of the organism make it a difficult subject, and
not all scientists are convinced a vaccine would be effective over the
long termand if the persons responsible for modifying the organism
kept releasing novel strains into the wild, even effective vaccines wouldn't
be enough.

Anyway. That's the sort of bioterrorism that worries me, and the more we
learn about nanotech, the easier it will be to do this. (Bacteria and viruses,
after all, are naturally occurred nanomachines.) Should I stop worrying?
Probably. Will I? Probably not. But I'll stop talking about it before we
all get depressed.

May 4, 2002:

One of the things I learned in reading Madeline
Drexler's book Secret Agents (see my May 2, 2002 entry) is that
we are furiously sequencing the genomes of disease pathogens in order
to figure out ways to counteract them. We're learning a great deal about
how viruses and bacteria hurt us and how they avoid the body's defenses,
which on the balance is a very good thing. I can't help but be a little
nervous about taking it the other way: Producing pathogens "to order"
as weapons that can be targeted against a specific enemy.

Drexler (and many others) have wondered why biological warfare hasn't
yet been waged in any large way. That's no mystery to me: Bacteria do
not recognize national borders or citizenship, and turning loose a plague
can backfire and wipe out the attacker as well as the attacked.

So...what if pathogens could be designed to narrowly target specific
demographic groups? Citizenship and geography (the identifying traits
in conventional warfare) would be difficult to target, but behavior and
(perhaps) genetic cues would be much easier. Such demographic targeting
might be especially attractive today, as a new species of tribalism is
abroad, encouraging us to think of ourselves as Blacks, Christians, gays,
or retirees before we think of ourselves as human or even as Americans
or Canadians or Russians. American politics, once almost entirely (and
fiercely) regional, has become more or less tribal, as demographic groups
like the ones I mentioned (along with hundreds of others) battle over
legal privilege, subsidies, discrimination, and so on. Back when AIDS
was still a poorly understood emerging infection, rumors were rife in
the Black and gay communities that the disease was a designer bug that
had been concocted specifically to infect and kill them. This wasn't the
case, obviously, but will the day come when such things are possible?

Count on it. We are learning a great deal about why some bacteria attack
one type of tissue and not others, and how antibiotic resistance develops.
Breeding custom bacteria is made easier by the fact that the organisms
mature and reproduce in minutes rather than months or years, so
the crude sort of hack-and-try genetic engineering (which is all we're
capable of right now) can actually produce results in months rather than
decades. Furthermore, bacteria have only a few moving parts. There's less
to understand and get wrong than there would be, for example, in breeding
designer dogs or custom cattle. Malformed legs and miswired nervous systems
are not an issue in organisms lacking legs and nervous systems.

I guess I worry too much, about that and other things, but about that quite
a bit. More on this tomorrow.

May 3, 2002:

I
honestly don't know why I'm laughing so hard at the Web site I just stumbled
across. Maybe it's because I came up in personal computing from back when
computers could barely turn over (my first had a clock speed of 1 Mhz)
but maybe because it's such a completely and sublimely gonzo thing to do.
I'll say no more, other than to say it's about drawing things with ASCII
characters. Go see for yourself.

May 2, 2002:

To
gauge the dangers of nanotechnology, I think it's useful to study the
nanomachines that nature has already developed, particularly viruses and
bacteria. One of the best recent books in this area is Madeline Drexler's
Secret
Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections. The book isn't about
microbes or even infections per se, but about how microbes change their
vectors and biochemical tactics, with sometimes devastating effects.

Some of those changes are mysterious, but some are direct consequences
of human activity. Most people understand that overuse of antibiotics
have bred bacteria resistent to them. Fewer understand that such bacteria
are doubly dangerous because they're kept in check to some extent by "friendly"
bacteria in the body, particularly in the digestive tract. When you take
the stronger doses of antibiotics often prescribed these days, friendly
bacteria die off, allowing the antibiotic-hardened bugs to run rampant
in the body.

Nonobvious insights like these are the real value in this book, but the
vivid journalistic description of the West Nile Virus epidemic in the
New York City area in 2000 was as engaging as it was chilling. Ditto the
explanation of why flu is dangerous, where it comes from, and how little
we understand the dynamics that allowed the misnamed "Spanish Flu"
to kill one percent of the entire human race in the 1918 flu pandemic.

Also sobering was the chapter on bacterial food poisoning. I've never
been much for raw food, and am lukewarm at best on sproutsnow, never
again! Drexler explains why alfalfa sproutsare about as dangerous as any
raw food you can eat: Because the salmonella organisms are present in
crevasses in alfalfa seeds, they migrate inside the sprout tissue
as the sprout grows, from which they obviously cannot be washed off. Because
of the way hamburger beef is processed, one infected side of beef can
infect hundreds of tons of burger, which is then shipped to all corners
of the country and beyond.

We don't do everything we could, sometimes for appallingly stupid reasons.
Unpasteurized fruit juice reliably kills several children every year,
yet irradiation, which kills microorganisms without heating and thus changing
the chemistry of the juice, has been so demonized by the junk science
crowd that juice packagers don't use it, even though there's more radiation
coming from the natural potassium-40 in the human body than from irradiated
juice. So junk science wins outand children continue to die. We
continue to allow use of low-level doses of antibiotics in cattle feed
as a growth stimulant, even though such use has predictably bred resistant
forms of salmonella and its cousins. Political turf wars between government
agencies regulating food production and political pressure from farm and
food industry lobbyists have also hampered efforts to reduce food-borne
infections.

The chapter on bioterrorism was less interesting to me because I'd read
most of it elsewhere, but like everything in the book it is well-written
and comprehensible to people (like me) without much background in biology
or medicine. The book's one major flaw is shared by many recent popular
treatments of various subjects: The author does not footnote individual
sources in the text, so it's tough to connect textual citations to the works
cited in the end-of-the-book bibliography. (Vicars of Christ is another
recent book that irritated me that way; see my entry for March 3, 2002.)
Still, it's an engaging read and a terrific overview of what we currently
understand about the ways that infections travel, change tactics, and kill
us. Highly recommended.

May 1, 2002:

A friend sent me a pointer to a
site that pleads for us to create nanomachine replicators so that
we can move all manufacturing to the Moon and thus save the Earth by not
using Earthside minerals or energy anymore. The author envisions Moon-launched
cargo pods landing in the ocean, carrying tools, toys, food, and anything
else we might need. Only in this way, he says, can we save the Earth.

I wonder.

I've studied nanotech for a number of years now, and worked it heavily
into my (still unpublished) novel The Cunning Blood. The notion
that nanoassemblers could create endless perfect replicas of an initial
artifact or artifact design is not new and certainly not new with me,
and whether or not it's even possible (I'm far from sure myself) hardly
anybody seems to think much about what it would mean to human society.
What it would mean, of course, is that about four fifths of humanity (generously)
would become completely idleand that would be serious trouble.

The idea of nanoreplicators itself is attractive. Here's a scene from
The Cunning Blood in which character Jamie Eigen takes a shortcut
through the Neverending Factory:

The messenger who had come
to fetch him paused at the door to a large cinder block building and
waved him through. Shortcut. Jamie and the other man walked briskly
between rows of corrugated sheet-iron tanks, with gloved and aproned
men swarming around them. Each tank was a never-ending somethingpipe
fitting, girder, length of ventilation duct, mercury vapor lamp, floor
tile, or any number of other things. The men watched dials and gauges
beside the tanks, and adjusted the automated hoppers that fed tiny spheres
of raw materials into the bubbling water where the magic happened. To
an outsider, it was magic in the purest sense: In a tank, the dirty-looking
water bubbled, then stopped bubbling. A man reached into the steaming
tank and removed an object. The water bubbled for a few seconds and
stopped. The man reached in and removed an identical object, and the
bubbling began again. Another man stacked the objects that came out
of the tanks on little trucks, to be carted off to warehouses and construction
projects. The smaller tanks were bled of waste heat by fans; the larger
ones with cooling coils and heat exchangers. The building was always
sweltering insidebut the men who worked there sounded very smug
about the brilliance of it all.

Jamie granted the system
a certain disarming elegance. A few kilometers outside of town he had
seen a five-hectare concrete pond of dirty water that bubbled and steamed
continuously. At one end, a zero-point generator in a bunker fed electricity
into the water. Into the other end a continuous procession of trucks
dumped crushed rock, soil, dead vegetation, and the entire town’s production
of trash and salvage. (That night, he suspected that Marv the Mason’s
ravaged body would slide into the pond as well.) Something in the water,
something related to the something that was in the never-ending iron
troughs, dismantled whatever was dumped into the pond into its component
molecules, and gathered like materials together. Periodically, a gantry
scoop erected over the pond dipped into the water and removed tons of
small spherical nodules, each of which was a chemical element or useful
compound. The nodules produced by the pond were composition-coded by
diameter, and were sorted from one another by a system of graduated
screens. Simple mechanical gadgetry fed the nodules into the galvanized
iron tanks as the gauges indicated they were needed. Skilled labor was
not required.

And this was in a borderline interstellar colony only a couple of years
from inception. Refine the concept a little further and nobody would be
in the Neverending Factory at all. Whether or not such a system would
be erected on the Moon (which I think is mostly absurd) the larger question
looms: What would the billions of people who partake of all the Free Stuff
from the Moon (now there's a book title!) actually do with their time?
How would they expend their energies? How would they see themselves fitting
into human society?

If I have a great fear associated with genetic engineering, it is for the
notion of demographic warfare, in which warring groups would use
genetically engineered microorganisms to either kill or (worse) sterilize
other groups. (I'll take up the question of why sterilization would be worse
in a future entry.) If the group that controls nanotechnology suddenly discovers
that everybody else living on Earth is simply a nuisance, the resulting
battles would reduce humanity by nine tenths, making Earth a sort of nature
park for the ruling aristocracy. Peasants are only required to do the heavy
lifting for the aristocracy; if your nanomachines make everything you need,
the peasants become an unnecessary burden who must be fed and housed and
guarded against. There are many SF novels here that would be too depressing
to write, but the possibility still haunts me.